Outing the US Empire: Trump’s Military Parade

You only had to see him goggle eyed and
enthusiastic beside France’s President Emmanuel Macron
last Bastille Day. The tricolours were fluttering, the jets
booming above in the manner usual for a lapsed empire, and
the President of the United States was thrilled to bits, delighted at the spectacle. “It was
one of the greatest parades I’ve ever seen. We’re going
to have to try and top it.”

Donald Trump wetting himself
over a military parade in another country was one thing.
That he is now attempting to bring that experience back to
the United States has local policy figures in a fix.
According to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, the president “has
asked the Department of Defense to explore a celebration at
which all Americans can show their appreciation.”

The
good citizens of the United States have tended to associate
such military affairs with the goosestepping types, eyes
glazed and bayonets erect with purpose before authoritarian
clowns. Only foreign types, unmoved by the impulse of
American liberty, engage in that sort of thing.

In some
ways, having such a parade would be a natural order for a
power that remains in denial about its imperial pedigree,
bastard or otherwise. There is a near pathological
preference to live in the bright delusional light of free
world defender of peace. “As distinct from other
peoples,” wrote the late Chalmers Johnson, that keen student of
US empire and its consequences, “most Americans do not
recognize – or do not want to recognize – that the
United States dominates the world through its military
power.”

An orgiastic display of US military symbolism
would be a direct, if discomforting change from the usual
pattern. States often tend to have military shows that are
inversely proportionate to their economic and social
success. More guns do not necessarily imply more butter in
the home. The Soviet Union, and the current Russian
incarnation, insisted on military parades as matters of
pride, though such shows are as revealing as they are
concealing. As Moscow terrified with its military prowess
and gritty warriors parading before the greys and browns of
the politburo, the state was unravelling in sickness,
awaiting ultimate implosion.

North Korea similarly insists
on the star studded show, the pantomime of military hardware
and vocal troops captivated by supreme leader, Kim Jong-un.
To take such an aggressive stance serves to also conceal
weakness and internal fragility. Besides, such displays
provide epic distractions for troubled populaces, a sort of
cinematic release packaged in military grandeur.

To that
end, a US military parade would reverse the order of things.
To have such a parade could be likened to a coming out
ceremony, a grand confession to the globe. The United
States, through dozens of military bases webbing the entire
globe like Arachne’s thread, prefers the rhetoric of
restraint and order while waging a series of conflicts that
result in an order of permanent war for permanent peace.

It was the coming of the Cold War, and the emergence of
the United States as the pre-eminent power after the Second
World War, that prompted the remark by the sharp Charles
Beard that the foreign policy of both Presidents Franklin D.
Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman could be classed as the waging
of “perpetual war for perpetual peace”.
That assessment duly stuck, though the US public, for the
most part, went into a state of permanent amnesia.

One
symptom of empire common to all entities which have
undertaken this venture is the illusion of some lingering
order without disturbance, the civilizing effects of the
Pax Romana delivered through soldiers bearing the
gift of peace or the more recent Pax Americana. This
supplies the nursery story, widely disseminated, that
international peace is maintained in such circumstances
while swords are turned to ploughshares.

Quite the
opposite is true. Such states of affairs ensure a constant
demand for conflict, the need for police operations and
bloody corrections, the deployment of auxiliaries and
allies, and the necessity for a hardened military industrial
complex.

A mild acquaintance with those blood thirsty
deliverers of peace, the Romans, provides the surest
precedent by which subsequent empires supposedly interested
in peace thrive upon. The parallels between US narratives
of power, and those of Rome, are striking. True, the Roman
empire incorporated local power elites and spread
citizenship. “It was generosity,” notes classicist Mary Beard, “even if sprung from
self-interest.” But it was Tacitus in his inimitable
account of Agricola, his father-in-law’s exploits
as governor of Britain in the late first century AD, that
left a superb critique of empire that remains as pertinent
to the US as any other.

Tacitus takes note of the
Caledonian resistance figure Calgacus, whose speech does not merely attack the
imperial predations of Rome, but the euphemising nature of
power and its concealments. “To ravage, to slaughter, to
usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they
make a desert, they call it peace.” There is nothing to
suggest that Calcagus ever said anything of the sort in the
name of liberty to rouse his troops – Tacitus was a
despairing critic of empire and its consequences, being both
recorder and analyst.

From matters of conspiracy to an
emphasis on the fake news complex; to the suspicions of
suited establish doyens who have long steered empire in the
shadows while proclaiming the virtues of liberty, Trump’s
opportunity for another show is here. It is time to put the
US empire on display.

As he has done before, the
current president overturns convention and confronts the
deep seated psychic disturbances of the US state. Forget
the clichés and deceptions about delivering peace. Ignore
the alarm from the imperial closeted types. (We, claimed Representative Jackie Speier, “have a
Napoleon in the making here.”) Put stock, instead, in
matters of belligerence, of making deserts. Place that
weaponry on show in lusty, persuasive fashion. And most
importantly of all, make Little Rocket Man green with envy.

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